Carbon Tanzania

Inside the project

Carbon Tanzania is a Tanzanian social enterprise that develops community-based REDD+ forest-protection projects, channelling voluntary carbon market revenue directly to the communities who own and protect the land.

The flagship Yaeda-Eyasi Landscape project, established in 2011 with Hadza hunter-gatherer communities, has grown into a 110,500-hectare wildlife corridor in northern Tanzania involving 12 villages of Hadza and Datooga people.

The Ntakata Mountains project, established in 2017 in western Tanzania, protects roughly 216,000 hectares of community-owned miombo woodland, including high-quality habitat for the endangered Eastern Chimpanzee.

Land tenure underpins both projects: communities hold legal Certificates of Customary Right of Occupancy or Village Land Forest Reserves, and Village Game Scouts patrol the forests to prevent encroachment and deforestation.

Image credit

Erasmus Kamugisha, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsImage source ↗

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Objectives

• Secure legal land rights for Indigenous and local communities as the foundation for lasting forest protection.
• Avoid emissions from deforestation by funding community-led patrols and land-use planning through carbon finance.
• Deliver carbon revenue directly to communities to support livelihoods, health, education and governance.
• Protect biodiversity, including endangered Eastern Chimpanzee habitat and miombo woodland ecosystems.

Approach

• Build on legally secured community land tenure (CCROs and Village Land Forest Reserves) rather than state or private ownership, and apply the Plan Vivo standard so payments flow to communities that demonstrably protect their forests.
• Employ community Village Game Scouts to patrol forest boundaries and monitor deforestation and wildlife, verifying avoided deforestation with Landsat satellite data and species-distribution modelling for chimpanzee habitat.